Eighty-Five from the Archive: Mark Singer

This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

Over his thirty-six years at The New Yorker, Mark Singer has written about, as Harold Brodkey put it, “some of the madder ranges of American citizenship.” Singer began writing Talk of the Town stories for the magazine in 1974, and he soon moved on to Profiles and longer features before reviving the U.S. Journal column in 2000. He has contributed nearly four hundred pieces on topics as varied as the collapse of Penn Square Bank, the fate of Arab-Americans in Michigan after 9/11, the filmmaker Errol Morris, the real-estate mogul Donald Trump, and the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Garrison Keillor has referred to Singer as “one of the great city slickers of American lit’ry journalism, a poet of New York, like Whitman but drier and funnier.” In the introduction to his 2005 collection, “Character Studies,” Singer wrote about his approach to reporting:

A lot of what journalists do, I believe, is a form of sublimated voyeurism…. The genre of journalism that I am inclined toward also resembles, in hybrid form, cultural anthropology…. As a reporter, I always know things are going well when it becomes evident that my presence has been taken for granted and that I’ve managed to fulfill what is both the anthropologist-observer’s goal and the voyeur’s animating fantasy: to disappear.

One of Singer’s best-known pieces is a Profile of the magician and sleight-of-hand expert Ricky Jay, which ran in the issue of April 5, 1993. In the article, Singer explores Jay’s theories on magic and his opposition to publicly revealing the secrets of the art. In this excerpt, Singer describes an episode where Jay astonishes David Mamet and Gregory Mosher with a card trick:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened: Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card. “Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card. He turned over the three of clubs. Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.” After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.” Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.” Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?” “Two of spades.” Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card. The deuce of spades. A small riot ensued.